“This was unnerving in two ways. The first was the more familiar sensation that it was just too much. You can experience this anywhere, in any shop or high street or shopping mall, at any time. Too much variety. Too much duplication. Too many choices to make that have nothing to do with need. Too much fantasy.

Too much stuff.

In this case, it was the highly specialised nature of Jerry’s Home Store (Fulham Road, London)’s display that had jolted me into a renewed awareness of what the existentialists would have called absurdity – an overwhelming, almost physical, even nauseating sensation of the utter superfluousness of all these things. On this occasion, outside Jerry’s, my queasiness was compounded by a sense that matter had come unstuck from its usual moorings, which give it some particularity and meaning (in the diners of New Jersey) and was drifting frivolously, fantastically and arbitarily through the international networks of consumption and exchange..”